It's More Than Just the Drama

Ever since I was a child movies have played a huge part in my imagination. It showed me what it meant to be immersed in a story and in a character. As I started taking on Film as one of my classes it has been such a fascinating topic that movies have become a whole new thing to me. After having watched a film I can get into long hour talks discussing the sets, characters, sound design and message it leaves and impacts the audience.

When the topic of a film critique or Rotten Tomato review of a film comes up and their views are different from mine it always makes me wonder, is there something they are seeing that I don’t see. So Film Critique interested me and I was excited to gain an understanding of it. At the start I thought it was simply enough to say a film was great from being blown away by the VFX, the thrilling experiences of the character or watching my favorite characters reach their goals, but that was only scratching the surface.

Something I picked up while taking this course was simply this statement. “A Film Critic's job is to apply different critical lenses to a film, to help us unlock different meanings.” This phrase made me realize that it’s all about looking at the story and how the movie delivers it to the audience. A film critic's job is to look at the history of that film, the way the film delivers the message through what we can see from the lens. Coming up with questions like, why was it shot this way? Why is the tone of the film set like this? What is the director trying to show us?

Having learned this, I began to see how exciting gathering more knowledge on a particular film is! From the movie Iron man, just watching the film as a fan was fun but having learned more about his character, what his action says about him, what his beautiful house says about him, the problems he faces to and how he deals with it, made me appreciate all the work the production team and director went through to be that detailed in tell his story.

My takeaway from the class is simply this. Critiquing films are more than just enjoying the drama and the cool action scenes. It’s about being immersed in another world and learning from the film's message.